


Brittle

by cruentum



Category: Torchwood
Genre: Community: writerinadrawer, WriterInADrawer 4.09
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-08-12
Updated: 2010-08-12
Packaged: 2017-10-11 01:31:41
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,499
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/106815
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/cruentum/pseuds/cruentum
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
      <p>This story is part of a short-duration writing contest.  Please do not comment on this story, positively or negatively, until this notice is removed.  If you are interested in this contest please visit http://community.livejournal.com/writerinadrawer.</p>
    </blockquote>





	Brittle

**Author's Note:**

> This story is part of a short-duration writing contest. Please do not comment on this story, positively or negatively, until this notice is removed. If you are interested in this contest please visit http://community.livejournal.com/writerinadrawer.

"I haven't been waiting," Gwen told Jack first off, just after she had opened the door and before he had stepped inside.

Jack looked much older, the way lines were tight around his mouth, and she didn't want to ask how long it had been and who else he'd managed to lose. Two years hadn't prepared her for Jack in his coat in her doorway, stepping into her kitchen.

She'd envisioned greeting him with her gun to his chest, with a slap to the face soap-opera style, breaking down in tears or a hug of relief. Instead she made tea, even offered some cake left over from one of Rhys's late-night biccie-and-milk attacks to fill the silence stretching between her and the swish of his coat over the tiles.

"I'm back," Jack said eventually and held his arms out for a hug, flashed a self-deprecating smile, then dropped them, arms and smile both.

He felt different. She didn't know how someone should feel centuries aged but Jack did. It made her shiver and glad she had the tea cup to hold.

* * *

Two immediate crises had been averted (Rhys had restrained himself from punching Jack, Cora hadn't cried upon seeing the strange man perched on their sofa) so Gwen took Jack for a walk down to the Bay. She needed the satisfaction of a little flicker of hurt, or any other kind of reaction that resembled what she'd felt for the last two years, unable to just walk away.

"It looks different," Jack said on the rebuilt Plass.

He didn't give her the satisfaction of a tearful breakdown. A faint smile for the former tourist office entrance, that was all.

"I'm back for a reason," he said when they settled on the concrete steps at the edge of the basin.

"Threat against the world and you need to save us all?" Gwen asked, scuffing her shoe at the concrete.

"You got it." Jack grinned a little with the bags under his eyes and his thin lips.

"I'm not interested."

"Oh, but you were always interested in the unexplainable, Gwen Cooper. Don't tell me you've changed that much."

"Friends died," Gwen cut through his straining, jovial tone. "It tends to affect people."

"Last planet I was on, 90 billion colonists, friends, lovers, family. They all died within a week. Interested now?" The smile had vanished from his voice.

* * *

"I thought UNIT takes care of it now," Rhys said, and Gwen had no reply for that. None at least that wouldn't keep them in their bedroom forever, discussing that Jack was back and that Torchwood, as dead as it was in every single way, had been reborn, too. For humanity.

Rhys didn't like being fed lines, Gwen didn't like feeding them to him, and Jack was sitting in their living room, staring at Cora while she was throwing Playmobile giraffes and elephants from her ark at him.

"I'm not just letting you go off to die," Rhys said, flicking at the curtains, then moving close to her for a kiss. "It has to be different now."

"I know," Gwen whispered against his lips. And she didn't like it one bit.

After Cora had fallen asleep they sat over roast and potatoes for the postponed Sunday dinner.

Jack's intelligence were _things he'd heard_, two postings on internet message boards and a hacked phone number followed by a terse e-mail exchange with someone employed by the CIA.

"So you're saying," Rhys said, potato on his fork dripping sauce, "that the 456, they-"

"The virus was never theirs. They were an advance guard for something much bigger, out to cut their own profit-"

"Children, they were children," Gwen interjected.

"-and this is-" Jack broke off, then started again. "People will die. They don't ask, they don't warn, they don't want anything you could give them. They're out to kill and devour the remains. Imagine a planet full of gassed women, children, men, animals, everything, lying in the streets, bloated, on their sofas, at their comp-"

Rhys dropped fork and knife to the plate, got up and left the room.

"You didn't die," Gwen said over the sounds of the flushing toilet.

"I did." Jack poked at his roast with his fork. "I died, I came back and after two weeks I felt worse until I died again and came back and died again and came back. Climbs into the genes, that's my best guess."

Gwen couldn't bring herself to ask how long it had been so they ate in silence.

* * *

"Oi! I'm driving! That's my daughter in the backseat." Rhys shouldered his way past Jack, and Jack, knowing what was good for him, kept his mouth shut. He slipped into the back with Cora, who babbled at him about the adventures of her stuffed toy mouse.

They pulled away from the kerb and the airport and eventually into traffic. The vastness of space between buildings and flatness of everything should have made her feel free, but Gwen felt like the sky was coming down to suffocate her.

They had two hotel rooms in the centre of DC, Jack was paying.

"I'm going to the meeting on my own."

"Jack-"

"Don't." Jack grabbed his coat. "I'm not making that mistake again. There'll be another one if it's legit."

He was out the door before Gwen could say anything else. Rhys shrugged at her and put aside one of Cora's picture books he'd been reading. Jack's two weeks had been up last week, and they'd watched him suffocate slowly. Since then Jack felt even more alien than before, like everything she'd known about him had been rewritten, and he knew it, too.

* * *

"It's Rex. Hi."

"Like the dinosaur?" Rhys asked and held out his hand.

"Yeah, something like that." The bloke's smirk grated on Gwen already.

Jack came in behind Rex and closed the hotel room door. They'd pulled the curtains because Rhys wanted to go for extra clandestine activity. Cora gurgled through the babyphone from the other room.

"Here we are, Torchwood Headquarters," Jack said and leaned against the door. "Gwen, Rhys," he introduced them. "Rex Matheson, CIA, still, and willing to talk for profit."

"Can't say I expected this. Not what you hear when you ask around about Torchwood." Rex raised an eyebrow at the picturebook on the bed and the collection of stuffed toys that had managed to migrate into Jack's room.

"What does he want?" Gwen asked, arms crossed in front of her chest.

"In. And protection," Rex answered.

"He has information, observations of deep space activity he'd only let me glance at and security codes which might not be worth much now. His employers are starting to be on to him with all the intel he has passed us." Jack paused. "They're probably looking for us, too." He gave a clipped nod, then went on to discuss the source material Rex had brought in.

How he thought they'd protect him, Gwen had no idea, but she wasn't about to argue when they were short enough on manpower.

* * *

"I'll take you to the beach," Gwen whispered. "Miami, I've always wanted to go to Miami."

Jack, Rex and Esther, someone Rex had brought in, were still up in the other room, discussing contingency plans and evacuation procedures.

"Miami, yeah, yeah I'd like that," Rhys replied, twirling a strand of Gwen's hair around his finger. They were both watching Cora sleep.

* * *

"We should have a different name," Rex said one night over a beer they all shared, celebrating a breakthrough of sorts. "Merlin's Tramps."

Gwen couldn't help but smile and even Jack cracked a grin even if his two weeks were almost up again, and his waterglass shook in his hand.

"How bloody Welsh are you trying to be then?" Rhys said, snorting beer over the table.

"As Welsh as I need to be, _mate_."

Rhys squeezed Gwen's fingers, smiled, and she gave him a smile back.

They had a few more files to go through that night. Between an entirely different jargon and hierarchy to uncover, meetings to plan on parkdecks and in late-night bars and Jack recalling waves of attack and warning signs, all of them were starting to look faintly ill.

They made an awkward team, jarring with their angles of heartache and arrogance and worry and Gwen's own bitterness that stuck at the back of her throat whenever Jack leaned too close to Esther or when he laughed at one of Rex's stupid American jokes.

It was hard not to compare this to the Torchwood of old, that laughter around the silly stuff and Tosh's smiles and Owen's stupidity and Ianto's dry wit and Myfanwy and the Hub. Hard not to compare Jack to old Jack either, the one who'd had a little more warmth for them all.

It wasn't the Torchwood of then, but somehow it was still Torchwood.

Torchwood: The New World.

A police car drove by. Even the sirens were different here but she'd get used to this.

**Author's Note:**

> This story is part of a short-duration writing contest. Please do not comment on this story, positively or negatively, until this notice is removed. If you are interested in this contest please visit http://community.livejournal.com/writerinadrawer.


End file.
